Mischa keeps having bad dreams. He woke up hissing a little while ago, and just now he was growling in his sleep.

Today we went to the outlets at Leesburg; it was more crowded than I would have liked, but less crowded than I expected. I needed to go to Lane Bryant to exchange some jeans I’d gotten in Rehoboth Beach - you can only return them to another outlet store, and I hadn’t felt like hauling ass to Leesburg before today. But I got the jeans in my size, and bought two sweaters and a long-sleeve fitted t-shirt. I almost bought a cute semi-formal minidress, but it just didn’t do anything for me. I also got a bunch of underwear - I tend to wear mine until they literally fall apart, and A had deemed that I only had about-to-fall-apart underwear, so she made me buy lots more.

Also, she put me on a strict diet. She introduced it in a kind of toppish way - or maybe that’s just how I read it, being a sub type - and so I’m following orders. It is like having my own personal diet coach who goes out to eat with me and everything, which is pretty cool. Right now I’m appalled by how little I get to eat, but I know it’ll get easier with time. It’s just frustrating right now. I think we started on Thursday morning? It feels like forever!

Oh, and my lolrus shirt arrived today. Woo!

Nothing fancy tonight, was busy gettin’ down and now it’s time for bed! I did get a litter box today to keep upstairs, we had one when Toadie was alive but we got rid of it after she died. Now Amanita is old and needs one upstairs, so I got one and this time we’re using crystal cat litter. I’ve never used that kind before…I’m not sure if it will work with the sifting box I got, but it doesn’t really matter. If not, we can just take out the sifter! I’m looking forward to the reduced amount of maintenance necessary.

Deaf Cats.
Mr. Harrison Weir, president of the National Cat Club, England, says in his book “Our Cat,” that a white cat of the long or the short-haired breed is likely to be deaf. Should it have blue eyes, the fancy color, it is almost certain to be deaf. Mr Weir, at a cat show, purchased a white cat - a beauty, loving and gentle, for the low price of two guineas. When he got it home, the cat proved to be “stone deaf.”
Then the trouble began. if shut out of the dining room, its cry for admission could be heard all over the house, for it being deaf did not know the noise it made, though its owner often wished it could hear its own cry. When it called out as it sat on his lap, it called with ten-cat power, and its commanding voice caused it to be named the “Colonel.”
One day a friend saw the “beauty,” and admired it so much as to accept it for a gift, even after being told that it was “stone deaf.” A few days after Mr. Weir received a letter from the friend offering to return the loud-voiced cat.
“Give it to any one you please, but don’t return it to us,” was the reply.
The “Colonel” was given to a deaf old lady, and both were very happy.
The Silent Worker, vol. 4, no. 35, October 29, 1891.

I am looking for tinkerers, somebody who can work with a soldering gun and little electronics. It looks like the CatCam Development Set may be the closest possible product available to the actual CatCam. Mr. Lee’s owner said he has approached the makers of the keychain camera about producing a fully functional CatCam, and he’s going to wait and see what they say.

The development kit can be ordered now, but I don’t know how to put it together. There’s some instructions on the CatCam website, but I don’t understand them. So I am appealing to those of you who read my website…can anybody put this thing together for me? I have got to find out where Agaricus goes! We want to give it to all the cats, but he’s the one we’ll send off first. Of course I will pay for everything - the set, all shipping, the SD card, and your time - I just need somebody’s soldering/tinkering expertise!

Added: I am all taken care of, neuro42 is helping me out!

I found my way to a corner of the web where concern is expressed about the website StuffOnMyCat.com. I was a little surprised by the suggestion that the cats minded or were being objectified in some way. I always thought that most of the pictures were just amusing, another form of playing with kitty. They certainly aren’t hurting the cats, nobody is putting crushing weights on the cats, it’s more like “oh this is my cute kitty she looks funny with a deck of cards on her!” A few of the cats look annoyed, like this reindeer cat, but nobody is being hurt here. Humans give their cats lots and lots of love, and we play with them, and we goof around with them. I’ve had cats all my life and I wouldn’t consider them to be objectified - it’s just silly. I guess I’m sorry StuffOnMyCat.com offended the posters on that site, but I simply don’t understand where they’re coming from.

I took the opportunity to find my entry at StuffOnMyCat.com. I had piled things on Truffle for submission but the photo that ended up getting posted was the one of Amanita chomping on Truffle’s head. (We’ve been calling him Tubbles lately - he’s put on some weight!) I was quite amused to find a few people saying in the comments, “I hope you broke that up!” Broke what up? They weren’t even fighting. Truffle was being a pain in the neck to his mom, and she was telling him to step off. Yes, sometimes our cats do get in fights with each other - it’s usually all Mischa’s fault, because he’s an asshole - and of course we break them up. But the ear chomp was just funny, not a fight. Oh well.

Oh, and I have over 400 pictures of my cats on Flickr. I am insane.

This is a paid post I actually have a reason for taking. The product shown at left is ES Clear for Cat Cancer. I didn’t mention it, but the one-year anniversary of Empress Wu’s death was on January 12th. When she died, I thought the pain would never end…it went on so long. One year later, I find it is greatly diminished, but I still miss her terribly. When I was tagging old posts and I got to that point, I could barely read them to see what tags they needed.

Our little Wubie’s death was ultimately caused by lung cancer, which I don’t think is too common in cats. The immediate cause was pneumopericardium, which is air in the sac around her heart. She had breathed too fast since we got her, like she was forever trying to catch her breath; a few months before she died she was diagnosed with asthma. But it wasn’t asthma, it was lung cancer, and it took my kitty away. She was a month or two shy of seven years old, and she was the only cat in the house who always looked to me first as her mama, rather than my wife - I am usually the “backup” mama to the other cats.

ES Clear is a natural product specifically formulated for cats with cancer. I don’t know if it would have helped her or not. It seems like it’s not trying to cure the cancer, but rather give the cat a better quality of life. Wu was only really sick for a day or two, and she seemed much happier in the oxygen cage at the vet’s office, but I would have tried anything to make her more comfortable.

That’s all I can write, I’m afraid. Writing this entry was harder than I expected it would be.

I just have to share this, because I am so totally thrilled about it. Ladies and gentlemen, today I am twice as close to being on Cute Overload as I will ever get.

If you saw my quicklinks in the past day or two, you may have noticed the scuba diving cat video that I personally captioned, including two minor errors that I don’t feel an urge to fix. It took me about 45 minutes to caption the one-minute video, because I kept having to start at the beginning to make sure everything was still in sync. Now, I know there are multiple editions of the scuba kitty video on Google Video. But only one of them is captioned, and the two posts from CO both include the captions. (It’s also up on CuteCast.)

No, it’s not me in the video. No, I don’t know the cat. But you know what? That is as damn close to being on Cute Overload as I will ever get, and I’m totally stoked. So there.

I was surprised to see an opportunity to come up for a paid post about a product for pet depression, stress and anxiety. I didn’t realize there was a market out there for this! The product is called Anivive, and it’s an all-natural supplement for animals. We have an anxious cat - Mischa licks himself till he bleeds in various spots, and the vet diagnosed it as anxiety, but we were never able to give him the Prozac. Anivive is a liquid that you put into your pet’s water bowl, which is much easier than trying to give them a pill. A single bottle is supposed to last a month, although given that we have four cats sharing the same water dish we’d probably end up needing a bottle per week. But still, if it keeps him from licking himself raw, and maybe makes him less aggressive toward the other cats, maybe it’s worth a try.

I just got through tagging the entries around Empress Wu’s death. Damn, that sucked. Much worse than tagging those around Toadstool’s death. I am going to need to go home and hug kitties big-time.

So I have tagged almost all of 2006 now. Tagging is not easy; as I mentioned it requires reading everything. It’s also been a bit of a pain because my site doesn’t like me opening so many windows on it at once; I keep getting timeouts trying to load edit pages. Only four more years to tag now.

Today is another woot-off, but I’ve had four meetings today and I missed the electronic sudoku game that would’ve been $10 shipped. Nothing else has been remotely tempting, really.